By Marisa Laudadio
12:23pm PST, Feb 17, 2026
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Newly unearthed emails suggest the late
Queen Elizabeth II's private response to son
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's ties to
Jeffrey Epstein was far more supportive than many realized.
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In early 2011, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor came under fire after two photographs emerged that raised questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. One showed the royal with the disgraced financier in late 2010 — two years after the predator pleaded guilty to solicitation charges in Florida and not long after he was released from jail. The other showed Mountbatten-Windsor with his arm around Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre in 2001; she has accused him of assaulting her multiple times. The royal has long denied any wrongdoing.
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Correspondence from March 2011, newly released in the Justice Department's Jeffrey Epstein files, shows that after the photos surfaced, David Stern — an aide to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — wrote to Epstein, telling him the former Prince Andrew had Queen Elizabeth II's backing amid all the scrutiny. "He has full support of his mum," Stern wrote, suggesting the monarch only thought "dealing with you was 'unwise,'" Stern added, implying "unwise" was the word the queen herself used.
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Queen Elizabeth II continued to signal her support for her second son even after he was forced to step back as a working royal in late 2019 following a widely criticized
BBC Newsnight interview. In that sit-down, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor claimed he'd cut ties with Jeffrey Epstein in 2010 during a visit to New York — the one where they were photographed together — because a face-to-face talk was the "honorable" way to end the friendship, the former Duke of York insisted. In that same interview, he denied ever meeting Virginia Giuffre, despite appearing in a photo with her.
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Queen Elizabeth II subtly telegraphed support for son Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor when she chose him to escort her to the remembrance service for her late husband, Prince Philip, in London in 2022. The same year, she funded the former Duke of York's civil lawsuit settlement with Giuffre, believed to be more than $12 million, despite his claims he didn't know Giuffre and had done nothing wrong, multiple British media outlets reported.
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The day after the photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Virginia Giuffre at Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell's London home was published in February 2011, the former Duke of York wrote to Epstein, "We are in this together," correspondence between the men published in the Mail on Sunday and the Sun on Sunday in October 2025 revealed. He also told Epstein to "keep in close touch" and said he hoped to "play some more soon." Not long after those messages were made public, King Charles III stripped his brother of his "Prince," "Duke of York" and "His Royal Highness" titles and announced Mountbatten-Windsor would have to surrender the lease of his long-time Crown Estate home, Royal Lodge, and relocate to a private residence on the king's Sandringham estate.
